The question about what Ben Bernanke would be doing now that he’s retired from the Fed has been answered. The ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve is the newest fellow at the Brookings Institution, one of the most influential “progressive” think tanks promoting world government (or “global governance,” the euphemism the internationalists prefer to use today).
“Today we at the Brookings Institution and its new Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy are excited to welcome Ben S. Bernanke as a distinguished Fellow in Residence,” announced David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center, in his February 3 Brookings blog.
“Mr. Bernanke, of course, has just finished eight tumultuous years as chairman of the Federal Reserve,” Wessel continued. “He was sworn in as Fed chairman in early 2006 unaware that fissures were opening in the foundations of the U.S. economy and financial system.”
Wessel then goes on to laud Bernanke as the “rescuer-in-chief,” the indispensible man who saved the global economy. Says Wessel:
Two years later, he was rescuer-in-chief during the worst financial crisis in 75 years. His mantra: Whatever it takes. As Glenn Hutchins, vice chair of the Brookings board, put it at the recent Hutchins Center inaugural event: “Despite the massive deleveraging of the last few years, we are still deeply in debt to Ben Bernanke.”
In the past few years, Mr. Bernanke has been presiding over an historic experiment in monetary policy — more than five years of zero interest rates (so far) and trillions of dollars in bond-buying, a controversial approach aimed at restoring growth to the American economy.
The bouquet from Wessel is hardly surprising; he and Bernanke have been longtime chums, and Wessel authored the hagiographic 2009 book, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, which, the reader might guess from the title, places Bernanke up there on the deity pedestal.
Its understandable that Wall Street tycoon Glenn Hutchins would be so effusive and “deeply in debt” to Bernanke over the “massive deleveraging.” Hutchins’ Silver Lake Partners investment firm, which specializes in leveraged buyouts, profited handsomely from Bernanke’s policies at the Fed, which have left all the rest of us, literally, deeply in debt. Hutchins, by the way, is a member of the board of directors of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. That is a pertinent fact that would seem to be newsworthy, but none of the MSM news stories we’ve seen on Bernanke’s new job have bothered to mention it. Nor do they mention that Brookings vice chair Hutchins is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR, the institutional Big Sister to Brookings) or that his Silver Lake Partners is a Corporate Premium Member of the CFR.
The CFR connection is no small thing, though the MSM financial reporters and pundits either ignore it completely, or scorn any mention of it as wild “conspiracy theory” talk. As we pointed out recently in a couple of stories on Bernanke’s retirement/replacement (see here and here), the CFR made a clean sweep of open positions at the Fed, not only placing CFR members Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer as chairman and vice chairman, respectively, but also fellow CFR members Lael Brainard and Jerome Powell as governors on the Federal Reserve Board. They are joining other key officials who are members of the same CFR Club Fed, including Daniel Tarullo, William Dudley, Dennis Lockhart, Richard Fischer — and Glenn Hutchins.
And, as we’ve noted, this CFR lock-hold on the Fed goes all the way back to the founding of the Federal Reserve System, the key architect of which was Wall Street banker and CFR member Paul Warburg.
The Brookings Institution, which describes itself as “non-partisan” and is frequently described by sympathetic MSM commentators as “centrist,” nevertheless, has justifiably earned a reputation as a “liberal-left” or “progressive” outfit, since it invariably promotes and supports policies and legislation that weaken our nation’s constitutional checks and balances; expand, strengthen, and centralize more power in the federal government; undermine our national sovereignty with increased regional economic and political integration with other countries; and empower the United Nations and its adjuncts, with the end goal of realizing a world government.
Brookings President Strobe Talbott (CFR) is an ardent apostle for world government. As we reported in 2008:
In a 1992 essay for Time magazine, entitled “The Birth of the Global Nation,” Talbott wrote glowingly of the vision he saw materializing, in which “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th-century — ‘citizen of the world’ — will have assumed real meaning.”
World government is a theme Talbott has continued to expound (and expand) upon, most recently in his 2008 book, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation.
Talbott was Bill Clinton’s Russia advisor and deputy secretary of state. Before that he was Bill Clinton’s roommate, first at Oxford and later in Moscow when the duo went to Russia in 1969. We noted, in the article cited above, “Rooting for World Order”:
Talbott’s journalism career began there in Moscow, under the tutelage of Soviet “journalist” Vitali Yevgenyevich Lui, who was better known in the West as “Victor Louis,” the nom de plume under which his articles appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Victor Louis was one of the KGB’s most important assets for planting disinformation stories in the western media, through his own stories as well as through the “scoops” he provided to western journalists.
Louis and his KGB overlords picked the young Talbott as the journalist (actually then just an intern for Time magazine) to whom they would leak Khrushchev’s KGB-massaged “memoirs.” It was this boost from Louis that launched Talbott’s career.
Talbott and Louis would remain close, and Talbott would continue to follow Louis’ KGB lead when reporting on the Soviet Union and U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.
According to former Soviet spymaster Sergei Tretyakov, Talbott was considered by Russian intelligence to be a valued source of information. In Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War (2008, G.P. Putnam’s Sons), Tretyakov told author Pete Earley that Russian intelligence classified Talbott as “a special unofficial contact.”
Nevertheless, the Tretyakov accusation and Talbott’s troubling relationship with KGB operative Victor Louis have not caused sufficient concern in official circles in Washington to cause any investigation of the matter; Congress, apparently, is too busy protecting the nation against such threats as “sports doping.” Lance Armstrong and other celebrity athletes are fair game; political insiders such as Talbott are off limits.
If Talbott is/was a Soviet/Russian intelligence operative, he wouldn’t be the only one to have made a home at Brookings. Victor Perlo, a member of the notorious Soviet spy network in the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s and ’40s, also worked for Brookings, in between his stints in “government service.”
Brookings: Where “Occupy Wall Street” Goes to Bed With Wall Street
Brookings has staked out the top spot on the left flank of the think tank realm, but that has not hurt them at all in terms of raising money from Big Business, Big Banking, and Big Foundations. Far from it; the leftwing brain trust is rolling in dough from wealthiest of the privileged elites.
According to its 2013 Annual Report, Brookings has amassed assets totaling $404,233,000, and its operating expenses for 2013 ran to more than $69 million. Brookings’ top donors (giving $1 million or more) include the Ford Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft Corporation, The Rockefeller Foundation, David M. Rubenstein, and John L. Thornton.
Thornton (CFR) is chairman of the Board of Trustees at Brookings and former president and CEO of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street behemoth (or “giant vampire squid,” as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi famously put it) that has prospered immensely from the policies of Bernanke and the Fed. Mr. Rubenstein (CFR), one of three vice chairs at Brookings, is co-founder and managing director of The Carlyle Group, the $176 billion global investment firm. The other two vice chairs at Brookings are Suzanne Nora Johnson (CFR), a former vice chair at Goldman Sachs, and Glenn Hutchins (CFR) of Silver Lake Partners. Strobe Talbott (CFR) also sits on this five-man executive committee of the Board of Trustees. All five are CFR members, and four represent the top of the Wall Street food chain that has been gobbling up more and more of us lesser morsels, thanks to the policies of (and their special, privileged positions with) the Fed.
Other trustees at Brookings are of similar ilk: Robert J. Abernethy (CFR), president, American Standard Development Co., Inc.; Abby Joseph Cohen (CFR), senior investment strategist, Goldman Sachs; Kenneth M. Duberstein (CFR), chairman and CEO, The Duberstein Group, Inc.; Ann M. Fudge (CFR), former chairman and CEO, Young & Rubicam Brands; Tracy R. Wolstencroft (CFR), advisory director, Goldman Sachs; Steven Rattner (CFR), chairman, Willett Advisors LLC; Andrew H. Tisch (CFR), co-chairman of the board, Loews Corporation.
Other major donors to Brookings, according to the 2013 Annual Report are Bank of America, Carnegie Corporation, AT&T, Google, Citibank, Daimler, FedEx, Fiat, GE, Siemens, Toyota, Barclays Bank, and Deutsche Bank, as well as the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland, Norway, Dubai, the European Union, and the United States.
Bernanke should do well in these environs; at Brookings he is among friends whom he has greatly enriched. Now it is his turn to be rewarded by those he has faithfully served.
Related articles:
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CFR Sweep at Fed: Fischer, Brainard, Powell to Join Yellen
CFR Pushes, Praises Its Own Stanley Fischer for No. 2 Spot at Fed
The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline
